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SECOND CHANCES
I NEVER understand why people choose January to try to relaunch themselves. Admittedly the societal pressure exists then and a reigningin seems wise after the financially and physically girdle-busting party season. But, my goodness, the bleak midwinter seems a tough time to halve your calorific intake when every fibre of your being is crying out for warmth and comfort food.
If you failed with your New Year’s resolutions in January, don’t beat yourself up. Instead try to rehabilitate them now, in September, the month for second chances.
Meant to take up running? Then seize the day now, while you still have daylight and the trees are turning russet and golden. This season of mellow fruitfulness is the time to improve your diet, not dreary January. This is my plan: after a jolly summer of excess, I have in mind a dry — or dryish — September, involving some proper exercise. I haven’t read them yet, but two of the biggest fiction releases for autumn 2019 involve cherished fictional characters getting second chances.
Next week sees the much-anticipated release of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments: The Sequel to the Handmaid’s Tale. And Elizabeth Strout’s gloriously caustic Olive Kitteridge is being reprised in Olive Again, out on Halloween.
A second-chance story that I have already read and loved is Jane Austen’s Persuasion, in which Anne Elliot, a spinster at 27, re-encounters Captain Wentworth, whose proposal of marriage she accepted then broke off seven years before. The friction between them is glorious.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in The Time Of The Cholera is another tale of enduring love and patience finally being rewarded.
But, spoiler alert!, perhaps the most stirring second chance of all comes at the end of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, when one man sacrifices his life for another — and redeems them both. As Dickens most certainly didn’t write: It is a far, far better thing to do something in September than to beat yourself up about not having done it in January.